Bargaining and Pricing in Networked Economic Systems

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Bargaining and Pricing in Networked Economic Systems University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Fall 2011 Bargaining and Pricing in Networked Economic Systems Tanmoy Chakraborty University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Behavioral Economics Commons, Economic Theory Commons, Finance Commons, and the Theory and Algorithms Commons Recommended Citation Chakraborty, Tanmoy, "Bargaining and Pricing in Networked Economic Systems" (2011). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 445. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/445 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/445 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bargaining and Pricing in Networked Economic Systems Abstract Economic systems can often be modeled as games involving several agents or players who act according to their own individual interests. Our goal is to understand how various features of an economic system affect its outcomes, and what may be the best strategy for an individual agent. In this work, we model an economic system as a combination of many bilateral economic opportunities, such as that between a buyer and a seller. The transactions are complicated by the existence of many economic opportunities, and the influence they have on each other. For example, there may be several prospective sellers and buyers for the same item, with possibly differing costs and values. Such a system may be modeled by a network, where the nodes represent players and the edges represent opportunities. We study the effect of network structure on the outcome of bargaining among players, through theoretical modeling of rational agents as well as human subject experiments, when cost and values are public information. The interactions get much more complex when sellers' cost and buyers' valuations are private. We design and analyze revenue maximizing strategies for a seller in the presence of many buyers, when the seller has uncertain information or no information about the buyers' valuations. We focus on developing pricing strategies, and compare their performance against truthful auctions. We also analyze trading strategies in financial markets, where a player quotes both buying and selling prices, again with uncertain or no information about future price evolution of the financial instrument. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Computer and Information Science First Advisor Michael Kearns Second Advisor Sanjeev Khanna Keywords Theory and Algorithms, Computational Economics, Algorithmic Game Theory, Optimization, Computational Finance, Network Economics Subject Categories Behavioral Economics | Economic Theory | Finance | Theory and Algorithms This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/445 BARGAINING AND PRICING IN NETWORKED ECONOMIC SYSTEMS Tanmoy Chakraborty A DISSERTATION in Computer and Information Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Supervisor of Dissertation Co-Supervisor Signature Signature Michael Kearns, Professor Sanjeev Khanna, Professor Computer and Information Science Computer and Information Science Graduate Group Chairperson Signature Jianbo Shi, Professor, Computer and Information Science Dissertation Committee Sudipto Guha, Professor, Computer and Information Science Ali Jadbabaie, Professor, Electrical and Systems Engineering Sampath Kannan, Professor, Computer and Information Science Eva Tardos, Professor, Computer Science, Cornell University (External) ABSTRACT BARGAINING AND PRICING IN NETWORKED ECONOMIC SYSTEMS Tanmoy Chakraborty Supervisors: Michael Kearns and Sanjeev Khanna Economic systems can often be modeled as games involving several agents or players who act according to their own individual interests. Our goal is to understand how various features of an economic system affect its outcomes, and what may be the best strategy for an individual agent. In this work, we model an economic system as a combination of many bilateral economic opportunities, such as that between a buyer and a seller. The transactions are complicated by the existence of many economic opportunities, and the influence they have on each other. For example, there may be several prospective sellers and buyers for the same item, with possibly differing costs and values. Such a system may be modeled by a network, where the nodes represent players and the edges represent opportunities. We study the effect of network structure on the outcome of bargaining among players, through theoretical modeling of rational agents as well as human subject experiments, when cost and values are public information. The interactions get much more complex when sellers’ cost and buyers’ valuations are private. We design and analyze revenue maximizing strategies for a seller in the presence of many buyers, when the seller has uncertain information or no information about the buyers’ valuations. We focus on developing pricing strategies, and compare their performance against truthful auctions. We also analyze trading strategies in financial markets, where a player quotes both buying and selling prices, again with uncertain or no information about future price evolution of the financial instrument. ii Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 ExpectationsfromaGoodModel........................ 2 1.2 Networked Bargaining . 4 1.2.1 BehavioralExperiments ......................... 5 1.2.2 Theoretical Modeling and Non-Linear Utility . 6 1.3 MechanismDesignandPricing ......................... 7 1.3.1 Limited Information Setting . 7 1.3.2 Bayesian Information Setting . 8 1.4 Pricing Strategies for a Financial Market Maker . 10 1.5 ConcludingRemarks............................... 11 2 Behavioral Study of Networked Bargaining 12 2.1 OverviewofResults ............................... 14 2.2 Background . 15 2.3 ExperimentalDesign............................... 18 2.3.1 Irregular Graphs . 19 2.3.2 Regular Graphs . 21 2.4 SystemOverview................................. 22 2.4.1 Human Subject Methodology . 24 2.4.2 SessionOverview............................. 24 2.5 Results....................................... 25 2.5.1 Social Welfare . 25 2.5.2 Nodal Differences............................. 27 iii 2.5.3 Comparison with Theoretical Models . 32 2.5.4 Human Subject Differences ....................... 33 2.6 Conclusion .................................... 36 3 Networked Bargaining with Non-Linear Utilities 37 3.1 OverviewoftheModel.............................. 38 3.1.1 Overview of Results and Techniques . 41 3.1.2 Related Work . 43 3.2 Preliminaries ................................... 45 3.2.1 Proportional Bargaining Solution (PBS) . 46 3.2.2 Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) . 46 3.2.3 Stability and Equilibrium . 48 3.2.4 Bargaining Concepts as Nash Equilibria . 48 3.3 Linear Utility Functions: Characterizing All Equilibria . 49 3.4 Existence of Equilibrium for Non-Linear Utility Functions . 50 3.5 The Bargain Monotonicity Condition . 52 3.6 ComputingEquilibria .............................. 55 3.6.1 Algorithmic Results . 55 3.6.2 The Algorithm . 57 3.7 Inequality of Sharing in PBS vs NBS equilibria . 59 3.7.1 Inequality in NBS equilibrium . 59 3.7.2 InequalityinPBSequilibrium. 61 3.8 SimulationStudies ................................ 62 3.8.1 Methodology . 63 3.8.2 Correlation Between Degree and Wealth . 64 3.8.3 Regression Coefficients.......................... 64 3.8.4 Division of Wealth on Edges . 65 3.8.5 Other Utility Functions . 66 3.9 UniquenessofEquilibrium............................ 68 3.9.1 PBS Equilibrium is Not Unique . 68 3.9.2 NBS Equilibrium is Not Unique . 69 iv 3.9.3 Uniqueness in Regular Graphs . 69 3.9.4 Characterization of Bargain Rallying Condition . 70 3.10 Generalized Utility Functions . 72 3.11 Conclusion . 73 4 Item Pricing in Combinatorial Auctions 74 4.1 Preliminaries ................................... 82 4.1.1 Notation . 84 4.1.2 Optimal Social Welfare and Revenue Approximation . 85 4.1.3 The Single Buyer Setting with Uniform Pricing Strategies . 86 4.1.4 Optimizing with Unknown Parameters . 88 4.2 Improved Lower Bounds for Static Uniform Pricing . 89 4.2.1 A Hard Two-Player Instance . 90 4.2.2 Extensions of the Two-Player Instance . 93 4.3 Dynamic Uniform Pricing Strategies . 95 4.3.1 A Dynamic Uniform Pricing Algorithm . 95 4.3.2 Lower Bound for Dynamic Uniform Pricing . 99 4.3.3 Dynamic Monotone Uniform Pricing Strategies . 103 4.4 Static Non-Uniform Pricing . 107 4.4.1 Full Information Setting . 107 4.4.2 Buyers with -XOS Valuations . 108 4.5 Conclusion . 111 5 Sequential Posted Pricing in Multi-Unit Auctions 113 5.1 Preliminaries ................................... 116 5.1.1 Basic Result . 118 5.2 LP-based Algorithm for Large K . 119 5.2.1 Approximation Factor . 122 5.3 PTAS for constant K . 124 5.3.1 PTAS for Computing SPM . 125 5.3.2 PTAS for Computing ASPM . 129 v 5.4 Additional Details . 133 5.4.1 Discretization . 133 5.4.2 A Property of Poisson Distribution . 134 6 Market Making and Mean Reversion 135 6.1 A General Characterization . 140 6.2 Mean Reversion Models . 143 6.2.1 Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Processes . 145 6.2.2 The Schwartz Model . 148 6.3 TradingFrequency ................................ 150 6.4 Conclusion . 152 7 Summary of Results 153 7.1 Behavioral Study of Networked Bargaining . 153 7.2 Networked Bargaining with Non-Linear Utilities
Recommended publications
  • Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science the MIT Press
    Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science The MIT Press Volume 1997, Article 1 12 March 1997 ISSN 1073–0486. MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward St., Cambridge, MA 02142 USA; (617)253-2889; [email protected], [email protected]. Published one article at a time in LATEX source form on the Internet. Pag- ination varies from copy to copy. For more information and other articles see: http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/jrnls-catalog/chicago.html • http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/publications/cjtcs/ • ftp://mitpress.mit.edu/pub/CJTCS • ftp://cs.uchicago.edu/pub/publications/cjtcs • Feige and Kilian Limited vs. Polynomial Nondeterminism (Info) The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science is abstracted or in- R R R dexed in Research Alert, SciSearch, Current Contents /Engineering Com- R puting & Technology, and CompuMath Citation Index. c 1997 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subscribers are licensed to use journal articles in a variety of ways, limited only as required to insure fair attribution to authors and the journal, and to prohibit use in a competing commercial product. See the journal’s World Wide Web site for further details. Address inquiries to the Subsidiary Rights Manager, MIT Press Journals; (617)253-2864; [email protected]. The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal in theoretical computer science. The journal is committed to providing a forum for significant results on theoretical aspects of all topics in computer science. Editor in chief: Janos Simon Consulting
    [Show full text]
  • (L ,J SEP 3 0 2009 LIBRARIES
    Nearest Neighbor Search: the Old, the New, and the Impossible by Alexandr Andoni Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY September 2009 © Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2009. All rights reserved. Author .............. .. .. ......... .... ..... ... ......... ....... Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science September 4, 2009 (l ,J Certified by................ Piotr I/ yk Associate Professor Thesis Supervisor Accepted by ................................ /''~~ Terry P. Orlando Chairman, Department Committee on Graduate Students MASSACHUSETTS PaY OF TECHNOLOGY SEP 3 0 2009 ARCHIVES LIBRARIES Nearest Neighbor Search: the Old, the New, and the Impossible by Alexandr Andoni Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on September 4, 2009, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Abstract Over the last decade, an immense amount of data has become available. From collections of photos, to genetic data, and to network traffic statistics, modern technologies and cheap storage have made it possible to accumulate huge datasets. But how can we effectively use all this data? The ever growing sizes of the datasets make it imperative to design new algorithms capable of sifting through this data with extreme efficiency. A fundamental computational primitive for dealing with massive dataset is the Nearest Neighbor (NN) problem. In the NN problem, the goal is to preprocess a set of objects, so that later, given a query object, one can find efficiently the data object most similar to the query. This problem has a broad set of applications in data processing and analysis.
    [Show full text]
  • Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization
    Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques 17th International Workshop, APPROX 2014, and 18th International Workshop, RANDOM 2014 September 4–6, 2014, Barcelona, Spain Edited by Klaus Jansen José D. P. Rolim Nikhil R. Devanur Cristopher Moore LIPIcs – Vol. 28 – APPROX/RANDOM’14 www.dagstuhl.de/lipics Editors Klaus Jansen José D. P. Rolim University of Kiel University of Geneva Kiel Geneva [email protected] [email protected] Nikhil R. Devanur Cristopher Moore Microsoft Research Santa Fe Institute Redmond New Mexico [email protected] [email protected] ACM Classification 1998 C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design, C.2.2 Computer-communication, E.4 Coding and Information Theory, F. Theory of Computation, F.1.0 Computation by Abstract Devices, F.1.1 Models of Computation – relations between models, F.1.2 Modes of Computation, F.1.3 Complexity Measures and Classes, F.2.0 Analysis of Algorithms and Problem Complexity, F.2.1 Numerical Algorithms and Problems, F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems G.1.2 Approximation, G.1.6 Optimization, G.2 Discrete Mathematics, G.2.1 Combinatorics, G.2.2 Graph Theory, G.3 Probability and Statistics, I.1.2 Algorithms, J.4 Computer Applications – Social and Behavioral Sciences ISBN 978-3-939897-74-3 Published online and open access by Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing, Saarbrücken/Wadern, Germany. Online available at http://www.dagstuhl.de/dagpub/978-3-939897-74-3. Publication date September, 2014 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
    [Show full text]
  • Uriel Feige, Publications, July 2017. Papers Are Sorted by Categories. for Papers That Have More Than One Version (Typically, Jo
    Uriel Feige, Publications, July 2017. Papers are sorted by categories. For papers that have more than one version (typically, journal version and conference proceedings), the different versions are combined into one entry in the list. STOC is shorthand for \Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing". FOCS is shorthand for \Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science". Journal publications 1. Uriel Feige, Amos Fiat, and Adi Shamir. \Zero Knowledge Proofs of Identity". Jour- nal of Cryptology, 1988, Vol. 1, pp. 77-94. Preliminary version appeared in Proc. of the 19th STOC, 1987, pp. 210-217. 2. Uriel Feige, David Peleg, Prabhakar Raghavan and Eli Upfal. \Randomized Broadcast in Networks". Random Structures and algorithms, 1(4), 1990, pp. 447-460. Preliminary version appeared in proceedings of SIGAL International Symposium on Algorithms, Tokyo, Japan, August 1990. 3. Uriel Feige and Adi Shamir. \Multi-Oracle Interactive Protocols with Constant Space Verifiers”. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Vol. 44, pp. 259-271, April 1992. Preliminary version appeared in Proceedings of Fourth Annual Conference on Struc- ture in Complexity Theory, June 1989. 4. Uriel Feige. "On the Complexity of Finite Random Functions". Information Process- ing Letters 44 (1992) 295-296. 5. Uriel Feige, David Peleg, Prabhakar Raghavan and Eli Upfal. \Computing With Noisy Information". SIAM Journal on Computing, 23(5), 1001{1018, 1994. Preliminary version appeared in Proceedings of 22nd STOC, 1990, pp. 128-137. 6. Noga Alon, Uriel Feige, Avi Wigderson, and David Zuckerman. "Derandomized Graph Products". Computational Complexity 5 (1995) 60{75. 7. Uriel Feige. \A Tight Upper Bound on the Cover Time for Random Walks on Graphs".
    [Show full text]
  • László Lovász Avi Wigderson of Eötvös Loránd University of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Budapest, Hungary and Princeton, USA
    2021 The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2021 to László Lovász Avi Wigderson of Eötvös Loránd University of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Budapest, Hungary and Princeton, USA, “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.” Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) is the study of computational lens”. Discrete structures such as the power and limitations of computing. Its roots go graphs, strings, permutations are central to TCS, back to the foundational works of Kurt Gödel, Alonzo and naturally discrete mathematics and TCS Church, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann, leading have been closely allied fields. While both these to the development of real physical computers. fields have benefited immensely from more TCS contains two complementary sub-disciplines: traditional areas of mathematics, there has been algorithm design which develops efficient methods growing influence in the reverse direction as well. for a multitude of computational problems; and Applications, concepts, and techniques from TCS computational complexity, which shows inherent have motivated new challenges, opened new limitations on the efficiency of algorithms. The notion directions of research, and solved important open of polynomial-time algorithms put forward in the problems in pure and applied mathematics. 1960s by Alan Cobham, Jack Edmonds, and others, and the famous P≠NP conjecture of Stephen Cook, László Lovász and Avi Wigderson have been leading Leonid Levin, and Richard Karp had strong impact on forces in these developments over the last decades. the field and on the work of Lovász and Wigderson.
    [Show full text]
  • How Well Do Random Walks Parallelize?
    How Well Do Random Walks Parallelize? Klim Efremenko ∗ Omer Reingold † August 24, 2009 Abstract A random walk on a graph is a process that explores the graph in a random way: at each step the walk is at a vertex of the graph, and at each step it moves to a uniformly selected neighbor of this vertex. Random walks are extremely useful in computer science and in other fields. A very natural problem that was recently raised by Alon, Avin, Koucky, Kozma, Lotker, and Tuttle (though it was implicit in several previous papers) is to analyze the behavior of k independent walks in comparison with the behavior of a single walk. In particular, Alon et al. showed that in various settings (e.g., for expander graphs), k random walks cover the graph (i.e., visit all its nodes), Ω(k)-times faster (in expectation) than a single walk. In other words, in such cases k random walks efficiently “parallelize” a single random walk. Alon et al. also demonstrated that, depending on the specific setting, this “speedup” can vary from logarithmic to exponential in k. In this paper we initiate a more systematic study of multiple random walks. We give lower and upper bounds both on the cover time and on the hitting time (the time it takes to hit one specific node) of multiple random walks. Our study revolves over three alternatives for the starting vertices of the random walks: the worst starting vertices (those who maximize the hitting/cover time), the best starting vertices, and starting vertices selected from the stationary distribution.
    [Show full text]
  • Classical Cryptographic Protocols in a Quantum World∗
    Classical Cryptographic Protocols in a Quantum World∗ Sean Hallgren †‡ Adam Smith †§ Fang Song ¶ Abstract Cryptographic protocols, such as protocols for secure function evaluation (SFE), have played a cru- cial role in the development of modern cryptography. The extensive theory of these protocols, however, deals almost exclusively with classical attackers. If we accept that quantum information processing is the most realistic model of physically feasible computation, then we must ask: what classical protocols remain secure against quantum attackers? Our main contribution is showing the existence of classical two-party protocols for the secure eval- uation of any polynomial-time function under reasonable computational assumptions (for example, it suffices that the learning with errors problem be hard for quantum polynomial time). Our result shows that the basic two-party feasibility picture from classical cryptography remains unchanged in a quantum world. ∗A preliminary version of this work appeared in Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2011. †Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, U.S.A. ‡Partially supported by National Science Foundation award CCF-0747274 and by the National Security Agency (NSA) under Army Research Office (ARO) contract number W911NF-08-1-0298. §Partially supported by National Science Foundation award CCF-0747294. ¶Department of Combinatorics & Optimization and Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Canada. Partially supported by Cryptoworks21, NSERC, ORF and US ARO. Most work was conducted while at the Pennsylvania State University. 1 Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Our Contributions . .3 1.2 Related work . .5 1.3 Future Directions . .6 2 Preliminaries 7 3 Modeling Security in the Presence of Quantum Attacks 9 3.1 A General Quantum Stand-Alone Security Model .
    [Show full text]
  • Lipics-APPROX-RANDOM-2019-0
    Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques APPROX/RANDOM 2019, September 20–22, 2019, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Edited by Dimitris Achlioptas László A. Végh L I P I c s – Vo l . 145 – APPROX/RANDOM 2019 www.dagstuhl.de/lipics Editors Dimitris Achlioptas UC Santa Cruz, California, USA [email protected] László A. Végh London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK [email protected] ACM Classification 2012 Mathematics of computing; Theory of computation ISBN 978-3-95977-125-2 Published online and open access by Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing, Saarbrücken/Wadern, Germany. Online available at https://www.dagstuhl.de/dagpub/978-3-95977-125-2. Publication date September, 2019 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at https://portal.dnb.de. License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC-BY 3.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode. In brief, this license authorizes each and everybody to share (to copy, distribute and transmit) the work under the following conditions, without impairing or restricting the authors’ moral rights: Attribution: The work must be attributed to its authors. The copyright is retained by the corresponding authors. Digital Object Identifier: 10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2019.0 ISBN 978-3-95977-125-2 ISSN 1868-8969 https://www.dagstuhl.de/lipics 0:iii LIPIcs – Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics LIPIcs is a series of high-quality conference proceedings across all fields in informatics.
    [Show full text]
  • Hardness of Approximation, NP ⊆ PCP[Polylog,Polylog]
    CS221: Computational Complexity Prof. Salil Vadhan Lecture 34: More Hardness of Approximation, NP ⊆ PCP[polylog; polylog] 12/16 Scribe: Vitaly Feldman Contents 1 More Tight Hardness of Approximation Results 1 2 Open Problems 2 3 Sketch of the Proof of the PCP Theorem 2 Additional Readings. Papadimitriou, Ch. 13 has a detailed treatment of approximability, with less emphasis on the PCP theorem (which is stated in different language in Thm 13.12). 1 More Tight Hardness of Approximation Results Last time we saw the tight results for hardness of approximation of Max3SAT and E3LIN2. Today we will survey some other tight hardness of approximation results. Definition 1 MaxClique — given a graph G = (V; E) find the largest clique. This problem is completely equivalent to finding the maximum independent set. Best known approximation algorithm gives n -approximation (which is not much better than the trivial log2 n n-approximation). Theorem 2 (H˚astad) It is NP-hard to approximate MaxClique within n1¡² factor for any positive ². The result is proven by tailoring the PCP Theorem for this specific problem (namely, optimizing the so-called “amortized free bit complexity” of the PCP). Definition 3 Set Cover problem: given a collection of sets S1;:::;Sm which are subsets of the set f1; : : : ; ng, find the smallest subcollection of sets Si1 ;:::;Sit whose union is equal to f1; : : : ; ng (that is, they cover the “universe”). The greedy algorithm gives H(n) ¼ ln n approximation to this problem (H(n) is the n-th harmonic number). 1 Theorem 4 (Feige) It is NP-hard to approximate Set Cover to within (1 ¡ ²) ln n factor for any positive ².
    [Show full text]
  • Open Main.Pdf
    The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School EFFICIENT COMBINATORIAL METHODS IN SPARSIFICATION, SUMMARIZATION AND TESTING OF LARGE DATASETS A Dissertation in Computer Science and Engineering by Grigory Yaroslavtsev c 2014 Grigory Yaroslavtsev Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2014 The dissertation of Grigory Yaroslavtsev was reviewed and approved∗ by the following: Sofya Raskhodnikova Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Chair of Committee and Dissertation Advisor Piotr Berman Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Jason Morton Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Adam D. Smith Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Raj Acharya Head of Department of Computer Science and Engineering ∗Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. Abstract Increasingly large amounts of structured data are being collected by personal computers, mobile devices, personal gadgets, sensors, etc., and stored in data centers operated by the government and private companies. Processing of such data to extract key information is one of the main challenges faced by computer scientists. Developing methods for construct- ing compact representations of large data is a natural way to approach this challenge. This thesis is focused on rigorous mathematical and algorithmic solutions for sparsi- fication and summarization of large amounts of information using discrete combinatorial methods. Areas of mathematics most closely related to it are graph theory, information theory and analysis of real-valued functions over discrete domains. These areas, somewhat surprisingly, turn out to be related when viewed through the computational lens. In this thesis we illustrate the power and limitations of methods for constructing small represen- tations of large data sets, such as graphs and databases, using a variety methods drawn from these areas.
    [Show full text]
  • Federated Computing Research Conference, FCRC’96, Which Is David Wise, Steering Being Held May 20 - 28, 1996 at the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott
    CRA Workshop on Academic Careers Federated for Women in Computing Science 23rd Annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computing Computer Architecture FCRC ‘96 ACM International Conference on Research Supercomputing ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing 11th Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity 15th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing 12th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry First ACM Workshop on Applied Computational Geometry ACM/UMIACS Workshop on Parallel Algorithms ACM SIGPLAN ‘96 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation ACM Workshop of Functional Languages in Introductory Computing Philadelphia Skyline SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming 10th ACM Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation Invited Speakers Wm. A. Wulf ACM SIGMETRICS Symposium on Burton Smith Parallel and Distributed Tools Cynthia Dwork 4th Annual ACM/IEEE Workshop on Robin Milner I/O in Parallel and Distributed Systems Randy Katz SIAM Symposium on Networks and Information Management Sponsors ACM CRA IEEE NSF May 20-28, 1996 SIAM Philadelphia, PA FCRC WELCOME Organizing Committee Mary Jane Irwin, Chair Penn State University Steve Mahaney, Vice Chair Rutgers University Alan Berenbaum, Treasurer AT&T Bell Laboratories Frank Friedman, Exhibits Temple University Sampath Kannan, Student Coordinator Univ. of Pennsylvania Welcome to the second Federated Computing Research Conference, FCRC’96, which is David Wise, Steering being held May 20 - 28, 1996 at the Philadelphia downtown Marriott. This second Indiana University FCRC follows the same model of the highly successful first conference, FCRC’93, in Janice Cuny, Careers which nine constituent conferences participated.
    [Show full text]
  • Program of the Thirty-Second Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing
    Program of the Thirty-Second Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing May 21-23, 2000, Portland, Oregon, USA Important Note There will be a workshop on “Challenges for Theoretical Computer Science” on Saturday, May 20, the day before the STOC conference starts. Details will be posted on the SIGACT web page as they become available. Sunday, May 21, 2000 Session 1A Chair: Frances Yao 8:30 am Extractors and pseudo-random generators with optimal seed length Russell Impagliazzo, Ronen Shaltiel, and Avi Wigderson 8:55 am Pseudo-random functions and factoring Moni Naor, Omer Reingold, and Alon Rosen 9:20 am Satisfiability of equations in free groups is in PSPACE Claudio Guti´errez 9:45 am Setting 2 variables at a time yields a new lower bound for random 3-SAT Dimitris Achlioptas Sessions 1B Chair: Ding-Zhu Du 8:30 am A new algorithmic approach to the general Lovasz Local Lemma with applications to scheduling and satisfiability problems Artur Czumaj and Christian Scheideler 8:55 am A deterministic polynomial-time algorithm for approximating mixed discriminant and mixed volume Leonid Gurvits and Alex Samorodnitsky 9:20 am Randomized metarounding Robert Carr and Santosh Vempala 9:45 am Isomorphism testing for embeddable graphs through definability Martin Grohe Coffee Break 10:10 am - 10:30 am Session 2A Chair: Frances Yao 10:30 am Circuit minimization problem Valentine Kabanets and Jin-Yi Cai 10:55 am On the efficiency of local decoding procedures for error-correcting codes Jonathan Katz and Luca Trevisan 11:20 am Statistical mechanics, three-dimensionality
    [Show full text]